My father is eighty-seven years old.

His father, my grandfather, who was born in 1890, was selected by the elders in his village in Lithuania to be sent away to school to be trained as a rabbi. He began the training, apparently more from a sense of duty than of passion. Before the course was finished he left the school and followed his older brother to America, to Cleveland, Ohio, where he learned the sheet metal trade. He raised his children in the Jewish traditions, and in the midst of an extended Jewish community.

My father rarely talks about his Jewish upbringing, and he has never been observant as long as I have known him. But I have one clear memory, from my childhood, of an evening when he showed to my brother and me his prayer shawl and tefillin, the small leather boxes containing hand-written texts from the Torah, which are bound by long leather straps to the forehead and upper arm and worn during daily prayers. They were beautiful, and exotic because they were entirely unfamiliar to us, and clearly very important.

So I know he was Bar Mitzvah. I know that at one time he, too, was steeped in the practices and trained in the traditions of Judaism. And I suspected that despite the intervening years, the memories of these traditions would be deep and true, and last a long lifetime.

When I called my father this week and asked him what he remembered about his Jewish upbringing, and what, if anything, he remembered about the celebration of Passover, he didn’t even have to stop and think. Eighty years melted away. “We used to have big Seders, when we lived in California,” he told me. “The whole family would get together at Uncle Hillman’s house. I remember sitting on my father’s lap. I must have been the youngest child – my cousin Eugene and I would have been – and both of us sat on our fathers’ laps.”

That’s how the teaching happens, in a Jewish family, in a Jewish community. At the heart of the Passover festival, which commemorates the Exodus of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt and celebrates the great gift of freedom, is a special family meal called a Seder. The word “Seder” comes from a Hebrew root meaning “order,” because the entire meal is a ritual, studded with symbolism, following a carefully prescribed order. This order is explained and reflected upon in the Haggadah, “the narrative” or “the telling;” the booklet which guides participants through the Seder and which makes the symbolism and the meaning of the formal elements of the ritual accessible to every participant, old or young, observant or not.

The story itself is a compelling one. No doubt you know the details: a nomadic people, enslaved in the prosperous cities of a neighboring country, inspired by a powerful leader to claim freedom as their birthright, led by the spirit of a God they had come to take for granted, delivered from slavery into…not a promised land, but a wilderness, a time of testing and transformation. The Order of the Seder retells this story, interleaved with ritual blessings, symbolic foods, songs and ceremonies in a rhythm that draws each participant into the journey, recreating the drama of persecution and escape, reaffirming the sense of destiny and responsibility, reconnecting each separate one to the fundamental blessing of freedom for the human spirit and the human community.

And so the candles are lit, with a blessing like this morning’s chalice lighting, invoking our power to shape our own destiny, and that of others. Wine is blessed and tasted, invoking the Power of Life that brings all earthly enterprises to fruition in the fullness of time. Hands are washed, ritually, ceremonially, to set this ritual aside from the inattention of daily life and to celebrate the water that flows through the story, and through our lives. Fresh young greens are carefully chewed, reminding body and soul of the renewal of life in the season of spring – but the greens are dipped in salt water, and their freshness is tempered by the memory of the tears of the Jews who once were slaves in Egypt, and the tears of all who suffer still in bondage of body or mind. Each element speaks to all the senses. The lessons learned, even by the youngest lap-child, are rooted deep in body-memory, they resonate with human experience. No wonder they last a lifetime.

And then the story begins:

Thousands of years ago the Hebrew people, beset by famine in the land of Canaan, made their way to Egypt, where there was food enough and places to build new homes. In peace and plenty, Hebrews and Egyptians lived and worked side by side, and the Hebrews thrived and increased in number. But over the years, the growing Hebrew population seemed to unsettle the Egyptians; the Hebrews seemed to pose a threat to the age-old Egyptian way of life. Pharaoh set them to building cities; harsh taskmasters kept them at their work, midwives were instructed to kill the Hebrews’ newborn sons, and still the Egyptians feared their numbers and their power, and oppressed them ever harder.

Into this atmosphere of oppression and fear and suspicion, a leader was born. Out of the complex tangle of Hebrew heritage and Egyptian defensiveness, the destiny of Moses is inextricably linked with the Hebrew God and the fate of Pharaoh, and with the indomitable people who transformed themselves into a nation whose religion of law has shaken the world to its foundations, and in some real way made each one of us who we are today.

Moses, set adrift in the Nile, the river of life, and drawn out to live in the palace of the Pharaoh. Moses, striking out in defense of the Hebrew people, and incurring Pharaoh’s wrath. Moses, coming face to face with the mystery of a God like a flame that burns but never consumes, whether burning bush or human heart. Moses, reluctantly taking up the call to confrontation with the oppressors and championship of the oppressed. Moses, like a go-between, taking God’s word to Pharaoh and also to the Hebrews, caught between anger and disbelief, presiding over plague after punishment. Moses, leading the people out of slavery, through the Red Sea that parted – how could such a thing be? – and into a wilderness that stretched bleakly, endlessly, fearfully farther than the eye could see, and farther than the imagination could encompass. “Go Down, Moses,” says the song, and the storytelling gives way to singing, children and adults together reaching for the melody, finding themselves in the words. “Let my people go.”

And again the story gives way to symbol, as the unleavened bread called Matzoh is presented as the bread that the Hebrews, in their haste to leave Egypt took with them into the wilderness: unrisen, sun-baked, bread of suffering, bread of rebellion, bread of liberation. A piece of the bread is broken off and wrapped in a napkin, and hidden for the children to search for and find after the meal.

And again the ritual reaches out to the children, posing four questions to be asked by the youngest ones, and answered by their elders. “When you sat on your father’s lap at the Seder,” I asked my father, did you ask one of the four questions?” “Oh, yes,” he replied. “Oh, yes,” he said again, more slowly, remembering. Generation after generation, the same four questions, the same four answers, establishing again why this night of Passover is different from all other nights of the year. Questions that give meaning to rituals and ritual foods – to Matzoh and bitter herbs, to dipping one food into another, to reclining at the table, leaning on one elbow this night of all nights. Questions that link distinctive flavors and textures to the old, old story. Questions that turn this ordered meal into a celebration of freedom, that ground that freedom in the love of family, as child, enfolded and supported by parent, hears and feels and tastes and learns.

Child and adult alike learn, again each year, about the ten plagues visited on the Egyptians. As each plague is named a drop of wine is spilled, reducing our pleasure as we remember the suffering of others, and reminding us of the plagues that even now threaten people everywhere.

Child and adult alike learn, again each year, about the ceremonial foods, symbolic of the major themes of the story: rebellion and liberation; sacrifice and salvation, the freshness of spring and the bitterness of slavery, the sweetness of freedom and our responsibility to safeguard and treasure it.

And then, at long last, when it seems to have gone on for so long already, when it seems that we will always be talking, always be explaining, always be hungry – then comes the meal. Then comes a collection of foods served always at Passover, foods that follow the complicated and somehow reassuring rules of Passover observance. The menu will vary from family to family, but in each family, the favorites will reappear year after year. Now the conversation grows lively and animated. Now people get up and move around, visiting, catching up, reconnecting. Now appetites for family are satisfied as well as appetites for food. Now commemoration gives way to celebration, and new memories are made.

There is power in the Passover celebration. Although the Passover has never been a part of my own family practice, I was drawn to the core truth of the story the first time I participated in a Seder. The loyalties that tear at the Hebrew people tear at all of us: the thirst for freedom balanced against the resignation to a familiar situation; the awesome privilege and the awful responsibility that come with freedom and with the special relationship that links Jews and their God; the imperative to compassion, as we seek not only to cherish and preserve our own freedom, but to find ways of extending freedom of body and mind and spirit to those who follow us on our journey, and to all who walk with us, be they friend or foe. These themes point to the common human story that underlies the particulars of the Exodus story, that finds each of us, struggling for self-definition and self-determination, mirrored in the struggle of the ancient Hebrews and the Jewish nation that they became.

There is power of another kind in the next chapter of the Exodus story – the chapter that is only hinted at in the Haggadah, the one that leaves each of us as confounded as it did those newly liberated ancient Hebrews. For liberation did not lead to an end to confusion and suffering. On the contrary, the far shore of that Red Sea was a wilderness, and the people had to wander there for forty years – until the generation of slaves had been supplanted by a freeborn generation – before they could enter the Promised Land. And we, like the Hebrews, are impatient. We wander our own personal wildernesses in the times of trial and of waiting, the times of hardship and confusion, the times when we cannot discern the right course, the right direction, the way to move ahead. Impatiently, we try to push through, push on, rush to the reward or fulfillment we seek. Rarely do we have the patience, the insight, to recognize our wildernesses for what they are: times and places of growth and transformation. Our times in our wildernesses are the times that shape us, that draw forth strength and creativity and wisdom. The power of these times is the power of life unfolding. This is a power to be faced squarely, with courage, and resolute patience.

And there is power of the most elemental kind in the bonds of law and love and learning that have carried the Passover story forward from generation to generation through thousands of years. Scholars date the Exodus to around 1250 BCE – more than 3000 years ago – and still the story is passed along, not through books, not through rote learning, but through the ordered ritual of the telling that feeds all the senses and echoes from generation to generation. This is the power that sings for me in the image of my father, more than 80 years ago, sitting on his own father’s lap in his great-uncle Hillman’s house, hearing and seeing and tasting and touching the great celebration of freedom, and of the human ability to overcome and to survive. This is the power that keeps that memory young and fresh in him. This is the power of the tefillin with their handwritten verses tucked inside. This is the power that resides still in the prayer shawl that I saw only once, and in my indelible memory of it – the prayer shawl, my father tells me, that was his father’s, and so is more than a century old. This is the power of faith in the resourcefulness of the human spirit, of hope in the wisdom of generations yet unborn, of love that binds my father and me, that binds Jew and non-Jew of every description, that binds past and future in a closely-woven fabric that covers the heads and carries the prayers of each and all into a future that shines with freedom.

I invite you now to take a moment, in silence, to touch into the power that the Passover may hold for you. Whether story or wilderness, faith or hope or love, let the power flow into you, and through you.

The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out.

Silence
Music

Amen.

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